Guest curator: IFFF Revisited
In this archive programme we dip into the Festival’s now 30-year-old-plus back catalogue and present ground-breaking films by women directors that are still highly topical today. By our curators combing through the archive, different themes and aspects possibly overlooked in the past can be spotlighted, thus connecting links in the history of emancipation and film where none were previously present (or visible). The long-term aim of this programme is to strengthen queer-feminist historical representation and memory culture.
In 2022, the film and media scientist Borjana Gaković joined the team and is presenting a program with two films by Ula Stöckl: Rede nur niemand vom Schicksal (Just don’t talk about fate) and Das alte Lied (The Old Song).
Ula Stöckl was the first female film director from western Germany to go to Dresden immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall to shoot a somewhat different version of the national anthem, the Lied der Deutschen. The complexity or even impossibility of reunification is at the core of her ‘on-the-ground report’ – deep, insurmountable rifts, in people’s private lives as well as in the political sphere.
The doyen of New German Cinema has had a key influence on feminist film history since the 1960s. She has the knack of putting documentary elements centre stage while incorporating a fictional dimension, in order to make a stand against the unbearable conditions and circumstances as they really are.
The signature of the curators of this programme comes through in the films they select. In 2020, Berlin scholar Kat Gorska curated a selection of experimental films from the 70s and 80s. The 2021 programme features a group of students from Ruhr University in Bochum presenting the subject of Club culture.
Guest curator: IFFF Revisited
Borjana Gaković is a film and media scholar, curator and author as well as a lecturer in film and cinema culture. Her work focuses on representations of history and medialities of historiography, European cinema of the 1960s, women and film, and war and trauma in film. She regularly presents historical film programmes at cinemas and film festivals, chairs film talks and panel discussions and gives lectures on film and cinema.
From 01.06.2017 to 30.11.2021, Borjana was media spokesperson for the German Association of Municipal and Cultural Cinemas, and editor of the cinema quarterly Kinema Kommunal. Since 2020 she has sat on the Programme and Selection Committee of DOK Leipzig, the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. Borjana has been involved in numerous film, theatre, exhibition and media theory projects, including as co-curator of the film programme Materiality of Memories. (Post)Yugoslavian Experiences (alongside Madeleine Bernstorff, SINEMA TRANSTOPIA Berlin, 24.02.-18.03.2022) and as curator of the tribute to Feminale and femme totale at the REMAKE – Frankfurt Women’s Film Days 2021 festival.
»What interests me and what I represent is emancipatory activism in the field of film work that rejects all forms of discrimination and hegemonic steering of the cinematic gaze. In this respect, I am very happy to be involved in the Internationales Frauen Film Fest Dortmund+Köln 2022 as curator of the festival’s IFFF Revisited section, as it offers a wonderful framework for becoming aware of and visualising bold perspectives in the history of feminist film.«
Ula Stöckl
»Everything on earth is imperfect is the Germans’ old refrain« – actress Grischa Huber quotes Hölderlin from the former ›death […]
Ula Stöckl
It is Christmas in Dresden, 1990. The steady camera movements reveal the dark brown walls whose apparent fragility seems to […]